Well done Businesses shortlisted for annual Chamber of Commerce excellence awards\NEWS A15 Shake it up Museum buildings get | - rooftop revamp as part of - community partnership \COMMUNITY B1 ‘Fitness fun Cardio kickboxing good for physical, mental and emotional well-being \SPORTS B4 $1.00 PLUS 6¢ GST {$1.10 plus 7¢ GST outside of the Terrace area) VOL. Ue NO. 21 terracesta idard.com'> _ "7 By SARAH A: ZIMMERMAN Co -SKEENA MLA Robin Austin says northwesterners are getting the short end of the stick in the B.C. Utili- _ ties Commission’s (BCUC) decision to allow Pacific - Northern Gas to dramatically increase its rates for a delivering gas to customers here. After more than eight months of negotiations: be- . tween PNG and intervenors such as Austin who op- posed the rate hike, the BCUC has decided to,allow. PNG to increase its delivery rates by more than 20 per cent. _ Gas utilities such as PNG have no control over the cost of natural gas and do not mark up the cost of the product, but they make their money from charg- ing customers for delivering the commodity. PNG had filed a request to increase its delivery charge from the October 2005 rate of $5.79 per - . Gigajoule to $7. 47 per Gigajoule. That i increase was - . 5 fo ; Dignity, § humour | in their work © By SARAH ARTIS | AT 9 A.M. on:aecent.sun-.. + ny Thursday morning; three friends gather near Terrace’s . ] train tracks around what they call home — a low square- shaped “cement _ structure, mostly buried in the ground, its wooden cover in pieces at its bottom. “A moldy mattress, where the men sometimes sleep, lies in the bushes a few me- tres away. “For our mothers and. forefathers,” says one of the | friends, Roy, as he raises a capful of sherry into the;" ‘air and splashes it on the ground. Roy and his two com- panions — Huey and Harry —are celebrating after a hard night of work, a daily morn- ing ritual. “Ft stops the shakes,’ explains. ‘The night . before, just like every night of the week, | starting at 3:30 in the morn- ing, they scavenged the streets of Terrace with shop- ping carts, jumping in and out of garbage dumpsters, in *Roy ay put into place on an interim basis Jan. 1, 2006 pend- ing the outcome of the hearings. ,. The final rate approved by PNG is $7.01 a Giga- _ joule, which is a 21 per cent increase in the delivery charge. - The.closure of Methanex’ s methanol plant in, Kit- imat, which used natural gas to make that product, was given as the reason because, it was PNG’ s larg- est customer. . AAS essentially given PNG everything its asked a. , for ‘which means that the shareholders have been protected from the shortfall in revenue by losing .Methanex and the ratepayers have to be the ones to pick up the difference,” says Austin, who spearhead- ed a petition containing thousands of ndmes from the northwest opposing the rate hike. ““T don’t believe it’s fair at all, { think at the very least they could have split the difference between the > shareholders and the ratepayers.” . Austin argues the rate hike will af fect those who can least afford it. “T also think, by. the way, that’ this i is not in ‘the , best interest of PNG in the long run either, because: -there have been a lot-of people coming: into my of- _ fice who will not pay these prices and they will just ’ go back to buming wood and, for some people, they will just make the capital investment of a pellet stoye or a pellet furnace — including me,” he says. Through the negotiations PNG. was asked to make several amendments to its projected revenue losses for 2006 in the wake of the Methanex departure. _ “The commission decided that our cost of service with a revenue deficiency of $4.1 million was the appropriate cost.of service and there was no justifi- cation for allocating any of the revenue deficiency to our shareholders,” says PNG official Craig Dono- hue. Originally estimated at $4. 104 million, that num- - " Wednesday, August 30, 2006 Jigher n atural gas costa approved | ber has now shrunk to about: $4.01 million, says Donohue. - “The commission would have had to have broken new ground for them to say the rates are too high: ‘just because,’”. Donohue says, adding that would have meant shareholders subsidizing. customers.’ ad _ Because the’ interim rates approved in ‘January’ were based on the original estimate of $4.1 million - in revenue losses, customers can expect to see a 39 -cent reduction in the delivery: portion of their this | fall with the new price being $7.01 ‘per Gigajoule, ‘Donohue said.” The rebate is retroactive to Jan: 1, 2006 and cus- - tomers should see the adjustment on their October bill. It will add up to about $18 ‘per average house- hold. "The new rates now Ww approved will mean an aver- age residential heating bill this year, of f approximat- tely $1, 260. DEWEY, Roy, Harry and Huey hang out at the place they call “home, “ near the Terrace train tracks on a sunny Thursday morning. All four men are e local “binners.” They make their incomes by collecting empties and recyclables from about 3:30 a.m. to’ ‘8:30 a.m. almost every night, and returning them to the Terrace Return-It Centre and ~ the Skeena Liquor store in the mornings. SARAH ARTIS PHOTO: search of bottles and cans. Pooling their money, the three “binners” have made to $70 a day, Hucy says. . “A lot of people call, us Harry “Belafonte” . is says Harry. missing most of his teeth but He got divorced sO he Stare at the walls. or at each Other.” of Okanagan Valley 35 sher- ~ry - how much depends on “TE they eat, it’s at t the Sal- vation Army, the soup kitch-> about $30 — enough for four bottles of sherry, ' The saying “one person’s junk is another's treasure” couldn't be more true here. The men’s main’ source of income is collecting and returning recyclables. others litter or throw away, or find- ing and selling goods such as old shoes in the trash. Sometimes they make up ‘ By DUSTIN QUEZADA the three stooges,” Roy says, “But we have our own nick- names.’ Roy “Orbison” has a scab on the bridge of his nose and a scar that runs the cen- tre of his stomach, from his chest to his bellybutton. The gnarly; purple line is from when he was stabbed during. the night while sleeping out- side.a few years ago. City readi TAXPAYERS SHOULD get an idea of the price tag for the city’s latest attempt to build a second sheet of ice as early as next week. City council is expecting : an early September report into the results of breaking the project down into small contracts as opposed to seeking one company to build it all. . If council likes what it sees, construction could begin as early as the end of September, says city leisure services di- rector Ross Milnthorp. The city’s new consultant for the project is confident the new price will be about half of the $13 million price tag it faced this spring when it sought one large company. That $13 million figure includes the actual construction he never stops grinning. And “Baby Huey” —. as in Huey, Dewey and Louie — holds himself’a step back from the others’ but stays close enough that he remains - part of the group. ‘Harry and Huey, a log- ger and carpenter: by trade, both own homes in New Ai- yansh. - “But there’ s no work,” Ss new ice cost of $10.54 million, a $1 million contingency fund and moved here. Huey and Roy have simi- lar. stories of wives gone. Huey couldn’t work any- more after his wife left two years ago, so he also moved here, he says. -Roy has an apartment in Terrace, where the group sometimes stays. But Roy says, “There’s nothing to do at home except roughly $1.4 million that would have been spent on parking Jot paving and architectural, engineering and project man- agement fees. “I’m not ready to give numbers but we’re in the ballpark,” said Wayne Aussem of North American Ice, the city’s new consultant. Roughly 40 packages were sent out to contractors who have enquired and those that have made bids, including i in- dividual trades. Aussem said between § six and eight local contr actors are _on that longer list. “I’m happy with the interest shown by locals,” Aussem said. “I think we’ll be pleasantly surprised by the results of the bidding.” So they spend most of their days here at the tracks, - and then wander. the streets at night collecting bottles. Almost every day like clockwork, they return their findings to the bottle Return- It Centre behind the Terrace . Inn at 8:30 am.. and the Skeena liquor store at 9 a.m. The latter is also where they Puy their day’ s supply rink c One of the ways Aussem proposed to: shave money off their earnings from the night before. The men are now used to’. oa "to get ‘stuck in dumpsters and. ‘scream . for help until hard. times on the street, they say. . They sleep outside, even during ‘the winter, finding — not-so-- anonymous and anonymous -covered areas around town like a small. ‘shack behind the downtown _ Tim Hortons. Os the cost was to divide the project into components. - For instance, both the refrigeration and steel building and sheeting components are being considered by three to four’. companies respectively in B.C. and Alberta — none of them | local. Last week, Aussem said just how many components the project would be divided into has yet to be determined. | He says based on bids, certain contractors may-be able to take on multiple components of the build instead of dividing them between different contractors if the Price is lower. “We won ‘t know until all the bids are in to see what the best value is,” Aussem said. \ Cont’d Page A2 \ -en or the Kermode Friend-" ‘ship Centre. “It’s not. unusual for them someone arrives.” The . worst’ “though, ‘they Say, are the groups of young men who harass them. and sometimes beat them’up in the middle of the night. y a - Cont'd Page AZ”. ur cen eee Ree